The tyrant dies and his rule is over, the martyr dies and his rule begins.
Soren Kierkegaard
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector.
Plato
Tyrants have always some slight shade of virtue; they support the laws before destroying them.
Voltaire
The worst form of tyranny the world has ever known the tyranny of the weak over the strong. It is the only tyranny that lasts.
Oscar Wilde
When the tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty and there is nothing to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader.
Plato
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.
James Madison
The tyranny of a prince in an oligarchy is not so dangerous to the public welfare as the apathy of a citizen in a democracy.
Charles de Montesquieu
Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God.
Thomas Jefferson
Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny.
Edmund Burke
Today the tyrant rules not by club or fist, but disguised as a market researcher, he shepherds his flocks in the ways of utility and comfort.
Marshall McLuhan
Democratic forms of government are vulnerable to mass prejudice, the so-called tyranny of the majority.
Maggie Gallagher
Those are serious questions of war and peace, of freedom or tyranny, whether or not there is ever going to be a hope of us instilling some democratic systems in a part of the world that frankly is breeding hate and destruction directed right at us.
Zach Wamp
When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know, the end result is tyranny and oppression no matter how holy the motives.
Robert A. Heinlein
It is the besetting vice of democracies to substitute public opinion for law. This is the usual form in which the masses of men exhibit their tyranny.
James F. Cooper
If people were always kind and obedient to those who are cruel and unjust; the wicked people would have it all their own way: they would never feel afraid, and so they would never alter, but would grow worse and worse. When we are struck at without a reason, we should strike back again very hard; I am sure we should so hard as to teach the person who struck us never to do it again.
Patrick Branwell Bront